In the last decade, a diverse conurbation of forces (climate change and energy crisis, pop genetics and saturation of the digital culture) started to sediment a new episteme concerned about energy. Cultural mediators have been developing this new shift between cognitive capitalism and green capitalism, digital code and genetic code, media art and a controversial ‘bioart’, between the fictional abundance of the digital commons and the artificial scarcity of natural commons. Schrödinger’s notion of negative entropy is taken as a key concept to clarify four different regimes of entropy, that compose namely the mineral, biological, industrial and informational domains. This sort of ‘geology’ of entropy is advanced to explain the fight of the human with different types of machines and as a critique of environmental fatalism and energo-determinism. More importantly it shows how social conflicts are a process of “negative entropy” against the entropy of value constantly governed by capitalism.

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Event concept:

Energy in architecture is normally considered as either an exclusively technical issue or something relating to the sustainability debate. While both these are important they are reductive – architects seeking to solve specific energy related problems. This project sets out to create a new paradigm for talking about energy, which can be used to stimulate and frame new forms of understanding.